Thinking this level of inequality is unsustainable isn’t radical, thinking it isn’t is

why has no-one written a book on the evolution of cooperation titled "Decent with Modification"? #evolution #culturalevolution

Four (!) three-year postdoc positions available at @au.dk: international.au.dk/about/profil... Join an incredible team & help understand the psychological & political implications of the clash between high-speed society & slow-speed democracy. Please share! @tboeggild.bsky.social can help with Qs

This week we talk to @babeheim.bsky.social about culture, change, modeling, running red lights, and the game of go. youtu.be/nqTkSK-qtJM www.podbean.com/eas/pb-hrn9v...

In 1970, Hunter S Thompson ran for sheriff of Aspen, CO, under the progressive “Freak Power” party platform. He lost by 31 votes despite receiving more votes than the previous winner, largely because the Dems and Republicans colluded to run a single candidate. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bat...

They just gutted Teen Vogue which had top notch political journalism. The media is continuing to purge any sort of political dissent to Trump and the oligarchs. www.vogue.com/article/teen...

I was laid off from Teen Vogue today along with multiple other staffers, and today is my last day. certainly more to come from me when the dust has settled more, but to my knowledge, after today, there will be no politics staffers at Teen Vogue.

This thicc 71-chapter book (academic.oup.com/edited-volum...) arrived just in time to use as the textbook for my new "Cultural Evolution" class I've just started teaching! Featuring this chapter from @cailinmeister.bsky.social @psmaldino.bsky.social & Jingyi Wu as well as much more including...

Congrats to all involved in the production of the massive Oxford Handbook of cultural evolution. You can read our paper The Cultural Evolution Of Science here: cailinoconnor.com/wp-content/u...

Screensnapshot of our times. Corporate pressure to use AI creates bad outcomes with real-life consequences; seeking to unpack the problem yields more pressure to indulge in the very thing causing the problem.

I know it’s too much to expect them to know their history, but if the American Revolution had a motto, it definitely would not have been “immigrants go home.” It would have been “get your fucking soldiers out of our cities.”

Re-posting this because I really like it and I think we need to understand identity from a functionalist perspective more than ever. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Revision posted! An evolutionary model of identity signaling with nested/overlapping/intersectional identities, complex multidimensional signaling capabilities, and a primer on ancient Mesopotamia. What more could you ask for? osf.io/preprints/so...

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs - Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75% - Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60% - Social Sciences by 50–70% - History by 60% - Biology by 75% - The German department will lose all PhD seats - Sociology from six PhD students to zero

Fully-funded 4-year #PhD in Cultural Evolution! Join my @erc.europa.eu project exploring how compression & compositionality drive cultural innovation: hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur... Apply by Nov 12! Maybe of interest to folks from #COSMOS2025 or @eslr.bsky.social? Please feel free to share! 🙏

We don’t need that fascist groove thing. m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q49B...

My house cat has stripes in his spots. I modeled it by putting a Turing cell differentiation model *inside* another Turing cell differentiation model. Here's the model if you're interested: enfascination.com/htdocs/Cats_... click Setup, wait 5 seconds, then Go

How do humans keep inventing tools and technologies that no single person could create alone? Our new preprint, led by @anilyaman.bsky.social & @ts-brain.bsky.social shows that semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution. 🧠📘 arxiv.org/abs/2510.12837

A main organizer of VC Defensa in Ventura County was rammed in his vehicle by federal agents and taken into custody this morning. This video is from VC Defensa IG and shows the ramming. Organizers are thinking he’ll be taken to LA MDC—headed there now

What is sexual selection all about... definitionally and mathematically? A super talented PI, Jussi Lehtonen, is looking for a postdoc to work it all out! Deadline end of this month. ats.talentadore.com/apply/postdo...

I am happy to share the conversation I had with @mgurven.bsky.social about the evolutionary aspects of humans living seven decades. Hope everyone enjoys! @princetonupress.bsky.social convergingdialogues.substack.com/p/449-living...

Thanks Paul for catching that error in our original post! Congratulations to @psmaldino.bsky.social on his ACE Course Design Awards for "Cultural Evolution" and for "Modeling Social Behaviour".

Honored to have won TWO Advancing Cultural Evolution Course Design Awards for my courses “Cultural Evolution” and “Modeling Social Behavior”.

What Thiel is saying about tax havens = what Altman is saying about copyright: "I can't be rich unless you let me steal from you." This is how Broligarchs differ from oligarchs of yore: the latter tried to hide their thievery; the Broligarchs trumpet their entitlement to steal as a natural right.

We're pleased to announce and congratulate the winners of the Advancing Cultural Evolution Course Design Awards! This competition recognises leading educators in the field of cultural evolution and their existing efforts to advance its teaching. We have 7 winners and 2 runners up (listed below):

Need some RAND game theorists to weigh in on how this effectively protests while also being impossible to show on fox news as a war zone.

I've written a bit about how information architectures shape our societies (www.nature.com/articles/s44...). This could foment a dramatic shift if dominant communication channels become superordinate to governmental regulation, controlled by one crazed billionaire.

the usual useful list: go.bsky.app/2Fq4P6e

Time for my annual reminder that, thanks to the precedent set by economists, ANY group can establish their own Nobel Prize for ANYTHING. Come on people, get creative.

I am happy to announce that our project on risk and social learning is now in press at Psychological Review. Several new additions and revisions thanks to detailed feedback from colleagues and anonymous reviewers. osf.io/preprints/so... @psmaldino.bsky.social @babeheim.bsky.social

@psmaldino.bsky.social and I also made a contribution to the Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology on how an integrative view spanning evolutionary, developmental and cultural influences on risk behavior can help us understand decisions under risk—a good companion piece. osf.io/preprints/so...

Happy to see this work published in Psych Review. It's an impressive and important bit of theory/modeling about how we learn about decision-making under risk. Here's a slide with the super-coarse-grained summary of our results. Read the paper for (much) more. osf.io/preprints/so...

Morning walk

Seen in the hallways of Aarhus University. <<Chef’s kiss>>

It was great to have Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social with us today, discussing evolutionary approaches to human culture and society. As a bonus, we learned why we are wearing pants.

“Well, the next time someone brings up a terrible anecdote about Cambodia or Vietnam, I will definitely drop the Star Wars story to show that people have two sides.” Chotiner deserves a Pulitzer for this.

Tomorrow @interacting-minds.bsky.social, we’re very lucky to have Prof. @psmaldino.bsky.social give a talk, starting at 11am. All are welcome - for further details, see interactingminds.au.dk/events/singl...

📢 Apply to our (2-year) research fellowships at @iast.fr Join a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and indisciplinary group of scholars in Toulouse, walkable/cyclable pink city of chocolatines in the South of France. Deadline: November 15, 2025. www.iast.fr/research-fel...

📣 Job alert! *Assistant Prof in Computational Social Science*. We're a friendly department, with sharp students, at a great institution, in a lovely city. We have real strengths in computational social science & are looking for a colleague to build this further. Share and reach out with quesions!

Prof. Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social will join us in Copenhagen on Wed, Sep 24, 12:30-13:15 to present at an exciting data science seminar! Topic: Why Use An Evolutionary Perspective To Study Culture? To attend, see: nerds.itu.dk/event/data-s...

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go! 400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

I'd never read Frank Wilhoit's entire piece in which he posted his now-famous definition of conservatism (which turns out to be just a comment on a blog post by @himself.bsky.social). A concise and useful political philosophy. crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...

🚨 Excited to share a new paper 📃, years in the making, with Zach Wood. We propose that human evolution is characterized as an Evolutionary Transition in Inheritance and Individuality (ETII). Explainer and OA paper below:

LSE's Department of Methodogy is searching for an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science. Applicants from across the social sciences are very welcome! Please reach out if you would like any more details.

💙New paper!💙 How is knowledge transmitted across generations in a foraging society? With @danielredhead.bsky.social we found: In BaYaka foragers, long-term skills pass in smaller, sparser networks, while short-term food info circulates broadly & reciprocally academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

people pretend that debate signals and defends a commitment to high minded politics. what it elevates instead is performative dishonesty as a basic mode of politics www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

it's absolutely critical to understand in this moment that people aren't largely reacting to who Charlie Kirk was as a person, but who they knew him as because of what tiny pieces of him got clipped out and stuck in their newsfeeds.

The count down starts for #CESRabat! Follow @ces2026.bsky.social and join us May 11-13 next year for an exciting meeting in Rabat, Morocco. Massive thanks to the #CESRabat organising committee: Sarah Alami (co-chair) Mathieu Charbonneau (co-chair) Zachary Garfield Edmond Seabright